BEIJING: President Donald Trump sought to present a united front with Chinese President Xi Jinping following two days of meetings on Thursday, despite lingering differences over trade and North Korea.

On trade, Trump criticised the “very one-sided and unfair” trade relationship between the US and China. But he stopped short of castigating Xi, saying he doesn’t blame the country for having taken advantage of the US in the past.

Trump said China “must immediately address the unfair trade practices that drive” what he said is a “shockingly” large trade deficit, along with barriers to market access, forced technology transfers and intellectual property theft. “But I don’t blame China,” he said. “After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?” To applause, Trump said: “I give China great credit.” His Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered a blunter assessment of China’s trade surplus with the United States, which in October widened by 12.2 per cent from a year earlier, to $26.6 billion. The total surplus with the United States for the first 10 months of the year was $223 billion.

“I think the best way to characterize it is that while we appreciate the long hours and the effort that our Chinese counterparts have put into those trade discussions, quite frankly in the grand scheme of a $3- to 500 billion trade deficit, the things that have been achieved are pretty small,” Tillerson told reporters in Beijing.

He said that, that, “in terms of really getting at some of the fundamental elements of why this imbalance exists, there is still a lot more work to do.” Tillerson also acknowledged that there were differences “tactics and the timing and how far to go with pressure” on North Korea. But he insisted that the two countries were on the same page. “There is no disagreement on North Korea,” he said.

Trump and Tillerson’s comments came during Trump’s second and final day in China and after lengthy meetings with Xi. The day included announcements that the US and China had signed agreements valued at more than $250 billion for products including US-made jet engines, auto parts, liquefied natural gas and beef.

Such contract signings are a fixture of foreign leader visits to Beijing and are intended to defuse foreign complaints about China’s trade policies.

Trump had made narrowing the multibillion-dollar US trade deficit with China a priority for his administration. During the presidential campaign, he accused China of “raping our country” on trade and pledged to minimize the countries’ trade imbalance.

For his part, Xi promised a more open business environment for foreign companies in China and said his country was committed to further opening its economy to foreign investment.

“China will not close its doors” and will open them “even wider,” he said, pledging that foreign companies in China, including American ones, would find the market “more open, more transparent and more orderly.” The United States and other trading partners have been pressing Beijing to give their companies more access to its state-dominated economy. But it remains unclear how far China will go to fulfil its pledges. Previous US administrations have hailed market-opening promises only to be left disappointed.

Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2017